Friday, August 26, 2011

Admin: Post Five Hundred

Back when I wrote post four hundred, I had estimated that I would reach this post some time in June. Based on prior performance, it normally takes about seven months to knock out a hundred posts. This year has been anything but normal. Between dealing with both an attempted and a successful house break in, selling that house to the city and moving to a new one, as well as having our first child, the blog just could not compete for my attention. That everything I just mentioned only added two months to the timetable is amusing to me. I'm not making any guesses as to when the next milestone will be reached, but I'm fairly confident that there will be a six hundredth post.

Out of prior top five posts, only two of them have held on a spot here. My top post of last nine months was not one of them. Top Five: EVE Online Stories received twice as many hits as the next down. It has been a perennial favorite for months now. The post saw a major spike in activity June 27, 2011, at the height of MonocleGate.

Sometimes, you just want more hits. So I decided, in a perfectly mercenary way, to write a speculative post called Random Shots: The Expansion After Cataclysm. Considering that we knew absolutely nothing at the time, people have been eager for any news or rumors and I certainly cashed in on that. Hits have been consistant since posting, though they have been trailing off in the last month or two.

The prior top spot holder, Top Five: Things To Do Before Cataclysm, fell to third place this cycle. Hits stayed quite high from the start, spiking up on December 5 and 6, 2010, but then dying completely when Cataclysm launched December 7, 2010. It had a good run.

The other top five survivor, By Request: Champions Online Q&A is the little engine that could, averaging a hit every day, even though it was first posted way back in September 2009. The reason the post in on this list, though, is because of the surge in popularity it received on January 26, 2011, the day after Champions Online went free-to-play.

The final post in the top five is a little more unique in its trajectory. After the announcement of the collector's edition for Star Wars: The Old Republic, I wrote Random Shots: CEs The Way God Intended Them. It's not a post I'm super proud of, but it did its job. I posted it July 21, 2011, it spiked on July 22, 2011 after receiving a high profile link from Kill Ten Rats, and it was dead by July 29, 2011. So even though it only received hits for about a week, that was enough to get the post onto the top five. Thanks for all the traffic, Ethic.

Gaming has been, much like my posting, rather sparse over this cycle. Rift certainly dominated a couple months of my gaming time. Otherwise, there were a number of smaller games like Bastion, Torchlight, and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. And let's not forget Portal 2. So mainly I've been focusing on games that can be played and completed in a reasonable about of time while staying away from, or putting aside, the monster epics. As it stands, I'm not missing them.

On the creative front, I continue to be very happy with my Unexplored Worlds series. I only got five posts up in this cycle, but they are some of my favorites. And now I've started my Farewell To Ascalon series which is really exciting for me. And, funny enough, it's actually helping me to enjoy Guild Wars again, a game that I haven't been able to play for a few years now.